Google, NTT and the US GSA Deploy SAML 2.0 for Digital Identity Management

NEW YORK, January 29 /PRNewswire/ --

- Organizations Worldwide Leverage SAML 2.0 Liberty Federation to Enable
New Business Services, Help Meet Regulatory Requirements and Provide Users
with Better Protection Against Online Fraud and Identity Theft

Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium working to build a more
trusted internet for consumers, governments and businesses worldwide, today
released highlights of SAML 2.0-based digital identity management
applications that are delivering real world value to users and organizations
around the globe. These applications are among the many public and private
sector deployments helping to drive a more secure and privacy-respecting
internet identity layer across applications, sectors and regions based on
SAML 2.0 standards.

"Virtually all federation efforts and almost all federation product
vendors have built-in SAML 2.0 support," said Gregg Kreizman, research
director, Gartner. "Governments and enterprises planning new identity
federations should base their implementations on the SAML 2.0 standards."

Standard in Use in the Global Government and Public Sectors

With government organizations in The Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe
building and deploying SAML 2.0-based identity applications, SAML 2.0 has
become the standard of choice in the global eGovernment and public sectors.
These governments are relying on SAML 2.0 to deliver a wide variety of new
online services to citizens, help meet compliance mandates and to provide
business and trading partners with a secure and trusted platform for
conducting identity related transactions. A digital map and description of
global eGovernment deployments based on SAML 2.0 Liberty Federation is
available at
http://projectliberty.org/liberty/adoption/egovernment/egov_world_map.

"The beauty of the proven interoperable SAML 2.0 standard is that it has
been developed with input from deployers and vendors of digital identity
management solutions to support a broad range of online identity related
transactions," said Roger Sullivan, president of the Liberty Alliance
Management Board and vice president of Oracle Identity Management. "From
authenticating at social networking sites to enterprise, financial and
government transactions requiring the highest degree of security and privacy
protection, SAML.2.0 is providing the foundation for organizations in every
sector to build and deploy successful digital identity management solutions."

Cross-Industry Demand for Secure and Privacy-Respecting Digital Identity
Solutions

The applications highlighted today are only a small sample of the
hundreds of B2B and consumer-facing SAML 2.0-based deployments and
proof-of-concept applications in the global identity market. These
applications span vertical segments where users and deploying organizations
demand the highest levels of security and privacy protection and proven
interoperability is critical to managing wide scale digital identity
management solutions. Liberty Alliance maintains a list of deploying
organizations at http://www.projectliberty.org/liberty/adoption with
highlights from the applications announced today including:

Google - Using SAML 2.0 allows Google's customers to treat web-based
authentication to Google Apps(TM) the same way they treat authentication to
their other services. "We're extremely happy with the number of products that
natively support SAML, as well as the number of people available to help our
customers use it," said Gabe Cohen, product manager, Google Enterprise. "We
chose to support SAML because it provides immense flexibility as a robust
standard and the security that our customers demand. Ultimately, we want our
customers to make their own decisions about their security and authentication
policies, and SAML makes it easy." For more information on Google Apps, visit
www.google.com/a.

NTT - NTT has developed SASSO, a personal Identity Provider that enables
users to single-sign-on to a PC and leverage the strong authentication
capabilities of the mobile phone to conduct a wide range of secure
identity-based transactions. SASSO uses the increasingly ubiquitous mobile
phone as an Identity Provider (IdP) to allow users to access a Service
Provider (SP). Once authenticated by their own mobile phone, the IdP on the
mobile phone issues a SAML assertion signed by a private key and sends that
assertion to SPs. The application drives strong authentication into online
transactions and leverages the convenience and privacy capabilities of the
mobile phone to allow users to better control their own identity information.
A Liberty Alliance SASSO case study is available at
http://projectliberty.org/resource_center/case_studies/ntt_sasso.

"Our technology employs mobile phones and SAML 2.0 to strike the tough
balance between security and privacy concerns on the one hand, and usability
on the other-two necessities in the modern world," said Dr. Kenji Takahashi,
senior research engineer and supervisor, NTT Information Sharing Platform
Laboratories.

The US GSA E-Authentication Solution - Originally launched in 2002 as
part of the President's Management Agenda, E-Authentication Solutions assists
federal agencies in mitigating the security and privacy risks associated with
e-government and helps control government costs associated with
authenticating large numbers of end users. In October 2007, the US General
Services Administration (GSA) announced that passing Liberty Alliance SAML
2.0 interoperability testing is a prerequisite for participating in the US
E-Authentication Identity Federation. The decision by E-Authentication
Solutions to have vendors pass Liberty Alliance SAML 2.0 testing recognizes
the important role proven interoperability plays in advancing identity
federations. More information about the E-Authentication Solution is
available at http://www.cio.gov/eauthentication/.

"E-Authentication Solutions wants federal agencies to be able to select
the software that meets their unique business requirements while also
delivering assurances that it will interoperate with other applications used
within the Federation," said Myisha Frazier-McElveen, Acting Program
Executive, E-Authentication Solutions. "The US GSA is requiring vendors to
pass Liberty Alliance SAML 2.0 interoperability testing to help ensure
identity products can interoperate from day one and provide long-term
business value to US Government Agencies."

Source: Gartner, Inc. "The U.S. Government's Adoption of SAML 2.0 Shows
Wide Acceptance", by Gregg Kreizman, John Pescatore and Ray Wagner, October
29, 2007

About Liberty Alliance

Liberty Alliance is the only global identity organization with a
membership base that includes technology vendors, consumer service providers
and educational and government organizations working together to build a more
trusted internet by addressing the technology, business and privacy aspects
of digital identity management. The Liberty Alliance Management Board
consists of representatives from AOL, BT, France Telecom, HP, Intel, Novell,
NTT, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. Liberty Alliance works with identity
organizations worldwide to ensure all voices are included in the global
identity discussion and regularly holds and participates in public events
designed to advance the harmonization and interoperability of CardSpace,
Liberty Federation (SAML 2.0), Liberty Web Services, OpenID and WS-
specifications. More information about Liberty Alliance as well as
information about how to join many of its public groups and mail lists is
available at www.projectliberty.org

Google and Google Apps are trademarks of Google Inc.

CONTACT:

    Russ DeVeau
    Liberty Alliance
    www.projectliberty.org
    +1-508-487-6102 - Office
    +1-908-251-1549 - Mobile
    russ@projectliberty.org
    Russ Deveau @ comcast.net
    AOL IM (Russ DeVeau): devcommruss

Web site: http://www.projectliberty.org